Master-/Bachelor Thesis Offerings

If you want to write your bachelor or master thesis with one of the researchers at the InES, please follow the guidelines below.

1. Application

In general we provide topics in the following areas:

In the field of Self-Organizing Software and Multi-Agent Systems, we are interested in the connection between individual actions and overall system behaviour, and in purposefully exploiting this connection in order to design productive systems. We investigate formal models describing agent strategies and interactions, we create AI agents which are able to exhibit social behavior and adapt to a changing environment, we evaluate the dynamics of such systems in simulated environments, and we particularly concern ourselves with the emergence of cooperation and collaboration in systems without central authority or governance.

Functional and non-functional characteristics of software systems are defined by their architecture. Therefore, research streams such as (industrial) Internet-of-Things or component-based software engineering provide researchers and practitioners with construction guidelines for desired architectural characteristics. Current systems can be categorized in delivering services to the user and being engineered in a smart way. For example, services being provided by IoT-systems must fulfil users’ goals in a highly dynamic and ad-hoc way. When building such systems, architectural knowledge management techniques as well as methods that automate architecture composition are strongly needed. Applying the underlying plug-and-play principle to IoT-Services requires marrying artificial intelligence techniques (e.g. word sense disambiguation or logical inference) with software architectures (e.g. Microservices or SOA).

Others to be listed soon

To apply for a thesis, please send an email with your transcript of records, CV, and the research area that your are most interested in to Nils Wilken (wilken@es.uni-mannheim.de). We are also open for topic suggestions, when the proposed topic generally fits into one of the listed research areas.

2. Writing Exposé

When we have topics and capacity in your selected research area available, the responsible researcher will contact you to discuss a concrete topic for your thesis project with you. Before you can start your thesis project, you will have to write an exposé about your concrete topic. The exposé intends to clarify the expectations of you and your supervisor on the content and deliverables of your thesis project.

In general the exposé should:

be at least two pages long (excluding references)

include the following sections:

Background & motivation

Goals of the thesis

Work plan

Your supervisor might adjust these general requirements to fit your individual thesis project. After the submission of your exposé, your supervisor will decide whether he accepts your exposé or not. Once your exposé was accepted by your supervisor you can start with your thesis project.

3. Thesis Project

During your thesis project, you are responsible for ensuring that your thesis project makes progress. It is also your responsibility to schedule meetings with your supervisor when you need advice or want to discuss your intermediate results. It is highly recommended that you schedule regular meetings with your supervisor to discuss the progress and further direction of your thesis project!

To write your thesis report you have to use the provided LATEX template and the thesis has to be written in English. It is highly recommended that you discuss your planned outline with your supervisor before you start writing your thesis report. The main part of the thesis report should focus on the results that you obtained during your thesis project and should not contain additional material that is not necessary to understand the content of the report (e.g., long code listings, data tables, …). For such additional materials, the appendix can be used.

4. Submission

At the closing date of your thesis project, you have to hand in your work to the secretary’s office of Prof. Stuckenschmidt (B6, 26 – Room B1.21). To make sure that someone is available to take your submission, you should make an appointment upfront. You have to hand in two printed copies of your written report. In addition to the printed copies of your report, you have to hand in the same amount of CDs/USB-Sticks that contain any source code you have written, data you have used, and instructions for installing and running your source code. Discuss with your supervisor, whether he has any additional requirements for your submission.